Thursday, September 22, 2016

You surely know Brunelleschi and Donatello, the greatest artists of the early Florence Renaissance (1400 ca, before America was so called, just to contextualize). And as it happens among the best, they were sometimes rivals, but that kind of rivalry that is intelligent, fruitful and respectful of the other.

A shining example of this kind of rivality is narrated by Vasari, a renaissance historian. Vasari recounts that Donatello, after having carved with great effort a crucified wooden Christ, thinking he had created an extraordinary work, showed it to his friend Brunelleschi to have his opinion.

Brunelleschi, expecting a masterpiece, laughed when he saw it and told him that, due to the excessive realism, "it seemed that he had put on the Cross a common peasant and not the perfect body of Jesus Christ."

Donatello, disappointed by this judgment, exclaimed angrily: "So take you a piece of wood and try you to make a better one."

Brunelleschi, teased, secretly started working on a crucified wooden Christ and four months later, encountering Donatello while shopping at the marketplace, invited him to lunch at his house, he put in his apron several eggs to prepare the omelette and he said him, "you go on that I'll catch up soon with the wine."

When Donatello entered in Brunelleschi home, he immediately saw the Crucified wooden Christ that Brunelleschi placed so to be artfully illuminated by the sunlight coming through the window. Amazed by that marvel, Donatello spread his arms dropping on the ground all the eggs and immediately after entered Brunelleschi who asked him, "And now what do we will eat?". Donatello, still stunned by that wonder replied: "I have already had my ration today. As for you, do whatever you want. I understand that you are allowed to make Christs and me peasants".

But nevertheless they were also great friends and one day Brunelleschi, with the complicity of also his friend Donatello, organized a memorable joke, both ingenious and cruel, against a woodworker, woodcarver and cabinetmaker named Manetto Ammanatini, said The Grasso.

This delightful story set in renaissance Florence, which deserves to be republished (if any of you have a Christopher Schwarz working email adderss, please, refer him), was written down by many authors, the most famous of which was Antonio Manetti.

On the Internet Archive website you can find, read and download for free in several formats, 14 versions of this story in ancient Italian and on the Department of History of the University of California website there is a .PDF version in modern english which is more easier to understand even for mother tongue Italian like me.

Two of the Italian versions, dated back respectively around 1500 and 1800 have two beautiful prints. The first show a classical renaissance workshop with one of that romanesque workbench which Christopher Schwarz has recently falled in love and the second shows the fat woodworker with some tools of the period, two of wicth are quite strange: a backsaw without the handle and a wooden plane thin like the Japanese ones, but with the cutting group in the unusual sequence with the wooden wedge between the blade and the chip breaker.